One of my favorite writers about family life is Betsy Hart, a Scripps Howard columnist. She wrote a column this week about how teachers in a suburban elementary school in the midwest gathered students in each grade to warn them about the dangers of Hula-hooping. I kid you not!
Hart asks, "Might we be instilling in our youngsters a culture of fear? Deny them opportunities to handle risk appropriately - or even inappropriately - and learn from such experiences? Could we actually be putting them even at more risk by not preparing them to use good judgment in the real world?" She concludes, "Are we harming our children by trying to do the impossible - protect them from life itself?"
Right after I read that column I spoke with a colleague at work. He comes from a family that practices good, traditional family values. He was diagnosed with ADHD as an early teen, and the family doctor prescribed Ritalin for him. It helped him focus, but it also kept him from sleeping at night.
Then, at age sixteen, a "friend" introduced him to meth. For the first time in his life he felt he could be successful in socializing with people. Meth gave him "ten times the high" he had been getting from Ritalin, which his parents had taken him off of when they learned that he had been experimenting with pot.
He loves his parents, and knows that they were just trying to help, when they took him to a doctor for his ADHD. Before the doctor put him on Ritalin, he had been anti-drugs. However, for him, Ritalin turned out to be the gateway drug that opened him up to trying other drugs. He is now 31, and has been sober for one year. He feels he has wasted fifteen years of his life.
Had his parents not taken him to the doctor, he might have stayed steadfast in his opposition to drug use. He would have had a hard time focusing, but maybe he would have developed other talents, like maybe become a musician. Maybe he would have learned to manage his ADHD, or outgrow it, at least partially. Please pray for this affable, bright young man.
As parents we try to make the decisions that we hope are in the best interests of each of our children. Sometimes, though, maybe the best thing we can do is to allow our children to be who they are, so that they can learn - often the hard way - and use their special gifts from God to make their own unique contributions to our world.
2 comments:
Great post, Bob. We live in a society that is so anxious to diagnose and pathologize and treat every little thing.
Personal experience with that kind of thing too Bob. My nephew was just different but not in a definable way. His parents were talked into giving him Ritalin. He's never been the same. My niece was drugged at 14 by doctors claiming that she was unipolar. It's taken 8 years but she is clean, sober, beautiful and looking forward to a wonderful life. And won't even take an aspirin. I can't say I blame her. Both sets of parents thought they were helping their kids. Get the word out: forget the drugs.
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